Small Study to Big Canvas | Tess W.'s Magnolia, part 2
Scaling up from A4 paper to a huge canvas – and early doubts about the composition
Hello Tess
Yesterday I shared my first iPad picture with you, and the painting on A4 khadi paper that it inspired.
Today I want to show you how I took those and started a work on canvas – a BIG canvas, as you requested.
This is the second email (of four) about what happened next.
Read the first email
I took this photo after quite some time painting the canvas.
I held the paper close to me, with the canvas in the background:
“Huge canvas on the left looks a bit small compared with the A4 painting in my hand.”
To get a better sense of the size of the canvas, please note that it’s standing on several sheets of the Financial Times newspaper (and the FT is one of the few remaining broadsheets, so the pages are big).
Here are closeups of the brushwork, to give you a sense of the layered colours:
Close-up of branches and magnolia flowers against brickwork.
As you see, I painted the tree in near-black, and painted Naples yellow on top, allowing just a bit of the dark to show through.
And here are some magnolia blossoms against the sky:
I like the lumpiness of the paint, which comes from painting layer upon layer.
As you see here, I put a lot of pale yellow green into the sky, to create a contrast with the violet and magenta of the magnolia flowers.
Here’s the whole canvas, photographed in (alas) artificial light later in the day:
This looks a bit more yellow than it really was.
The next day, I looked at it again in daylight.
I didn’t feel happy with it. Not because of the daylight or evening light. I had misgivings about the composition. I think I sent you some of these photos – and it turned out later that you too had questions about the composition.
More about that tomorrow.